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The Sun Sentinel's reporters spent a year investigating child sex trafficking, a problem that has generated surprisingly little in-depth journalism. The newspaper wanted to understand how an illegal business that’s routinely condemned, the subject of task forces, working groups, press releases and legislation, had been allowed to persist virtually in plain sight.

Major findings:

• Although Florida hotels racked up more than 14,000 violations of a 2019 state anti-trafficking law, not a single one had been fined. The law, passed with bipartisan support and a flurry of self-congratulatory public statements, turned out to be toothless, as hotel managers continued to ignore clear signs that girls were being trafficked in their rooms.
• The Florida foster care system had turned into an unwitting pipeline for delivering vulnerable girls to traffickers, who had learned to infiltrate the system to find victims. The state exploited a loophole in federal law to keep group homes open, which kept in operation one of the main sources of victims.
• Florida’s legal system continued to treat trafficking victims as criminals, using an old-fashioned approach to law enforcement that left victims with criminal records. Florida remained one of the few states that allowed victims to be deposed by defense lawyers prior to trial, an ordeal that made many reluctant to press charges.

2022 IRE Award Finalist, Print/Online (written word) > Division 2